10 helpful tips for Novice PHP developers

Sometimes during development, errors, bugs and warnings are not displayed and we do not get perfect output or some time it displays directly errors to the visitors. So in this case of development turn on error reporting. There are different levels of strictness in the reporting that you can use, but if you use E_ALL it will show you the most critical errors and warnings. Once you’ve completed development and ready for production, you’ll want to turn off error reporting otherwise your visitors will see strange errors which they mayn’t understand.

While development on server many developers use code to get server php details and forget to remove from server. This is a really insecure practice, as hackers can get server detail. Make sure phpinfo() is in a secure spot, and as an extra measure, delete it once you’re done.

In development use meaningful and consistent naming conventions for class, function, variables, objects etc. It’s easy for team members or future developers to understand.

To display string, developer use single and double quotes. Best practice to use single quotes. Single quotes in strings as the parser doesn’t have to sift through the code to look for escaped characters and other things that double quotes allow. Always try to use single quotes whenever possible.

Some developer makes code more appealing by using extra or unnecessary variable. That will consume double memory and also cache. Avoid to use that.

For Example
Code with Extra Variables:
$description = strip_tags($_POST[‘description’]);
echo $description;
Code without Extra Variables:
echo strip_tags($_POST[‘description’]);

Many beginner developers store sensitive data like passwords into the database without encrypting. Use MD5 to encrypt passwords before you put them into the database.
For Example:
echo md5(‘myPassword’);

Many developer use shortcuts like , , <% %> instead of . to save few characters, other methods are depreciated and unofficial. Stick with the standard as it will be guaranteed to be supported in all future versions.

Shortcuts:

<% echo “Hello world”; %>
Instead that use following:

Output buffering is used to improve the performance and speed of your PHP script. Without output buffering, your script will show the HTML on the page in pieces. Adding output buffering allows the PHP to store the HTML as a variable and send it to the browser in one chunk. To use output buffering in script add ob_start() at the top of the file.

If ob_start() used for buffering also append the “ob_end_flush(); at bottom of PHP script. Developers can also used ob_start(‘ob_gzhandler’) to compress the HTML.

Relative paths first searches for directories specified in the include paths of php, then looks from the current directory.

So many directories are checked. When a script is being run from cron, it may not have its parent directory as the working directory.

Relative path:

require(‘/var/www/project/file.php’);

Absolute path:
define(‘ROOT’ , ‘/var/www/project/’);
require(‘/var/www/project/file.php’);

Absolute path and will always stay constant. But we can improve that using portable magic constants like __FILE__.

define(‘ROOT’ , pathinfo(__FILE__, PATHINFO_DIRNAME));
require(‘/var/www/project/file.php’);